During the 1990s I had untold opportunities to witness the full exuberance of nature’s rich offerings. My parents’ house on the southwestern edge of Ecuador’s capital Quito was set in a prime location for observing all manner of wildlife. And most memorable of all were the hummingbirds that frequented our garden attracted as they were to the blooming plants that had been strategically potted next to the outside walls of our living room. These veritable masters of flight, the smallest of warm blooded creatures on our planet, arrived with the sole purpose of extracting sweet nectar from the flowers we had laid before them. Their hovering maneuverability was their most striking attribute. Read More ›

See David Hart’s account of Marks’ realization of the “blindingly obvious”  here.

Yet again, we have this utterly meaningless question asked of an electoral candidate during a debate, in an attempt to discredit her. My response, had I been asked this question, would have been as follows: Does evolution mean that living things have changed over time? Does evolution mean universal common ancestry? Does evolution mean that random errors filtered by natural selection explain all of biology, including the origin of the functionally specified information encoded in the base-four digital code of the DNA molecule, along with the information-processing machinery that translates it, performs error detection and repair, and much more? If your definition of “evolution” is the latter, can you supply us with adequate evidence that the probabilistic resources have existed Read More ›

Evolutionists are adamant that science must be free of religion or anything that smacks of religion. And while that sounds good, evolutionists are all-the-while driven by religion. They are sure all of biology is a fluke because of their religious convictions. Religion is both the source of evolution’s certainty and the target of its wrath. While not proclaiming that science must be free of religion, evolutionists make a wide spectrum of religious claims that mandate their theory.  Read more

I’m writing to tell people about a paper of mine that was published in Synthese last month, titled:  “Self-organisation in dynamical systems: a limiting result”.  While the paper doesn’t address intelligent design as such, it indirectly establishes strict limits to what such evolutionary mechanisms as natural selection can accomplish.  In particular, it shows that physical laws, operating on an initially random arrangement of matter, cannot produce complex objects with any reasonable chance in any reasonable time.

The published version may be downloaded (payment or subscription needed) from Springer at:

         http://www.springerlink.com/content/74316rt8373k560x/

Alternatively, a pre-published version is freely available at:

         http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/rjohns/spontaneous_4.pdf

The argument is based on a number of original mathematical theorems that are proved in the paper.  A less technical presentation of the argument is however given below.

Read More ›

In this article British neuroscientist Patrick Haggard has his assistant stimulate parts of his brain in a way that causes his fingers to twitch.  Then the scientist announces in magisterial tones, “See, we have no free will.”  Rubbish.   For decades we have known that stimulating certain areas of the brain with electrical impulses causes reactions in the muscles.  No one has ever disputed this or that there is a material (in the philosophical sense of that word) cause-effect relationship between brain function and body function.  It is one thing to conclude there is a material cause and effect relationship between the brain and body function, but it is something entirely different to assert that the existence of this material cause Read More ›

The archetypal image of Neanderthals has been one that reinforced the Darwinian story of human evolution. A Washington Post story puts it like this: “Early study of Neanderthals described them as very hairy, brutish, unable to talk or walk like more-modern humans.” Although things have changed slowly, media presentations have continued to create an impression that does not differ much from this description. However, the evidence for their humanity has accumulated rather rapidly in recent years, and the past month has seen two significant additions to the literature. A Wired Science report introduces one of these studies like this: “For decades, Neanderthal was cultural shorthand for primitive. Our closest non-living relatives were caricatured as lumbering, slope-browed simpletons unable to keep Read More ›

Drosophila melanogaster is a model organism for the study of genetics and some laboratory populations have been bred for different life-history traits over the course of 30 years. Professor Michael Rose, of UC Irvine, began breeding flies with accelerated development in 1991 (600 generations ago). Doctoral student Molly Burke compared the experimental flies with a control group on a genome-wide basis. This is significant because it is the first time such a study of a sexually reproducing species has been done. Burke examined specific genes and also obtained “whole-genome resequencing data from Drosophila populations that have undergone 600 generations of laboratory selection for accelerated development.” The results are noteworthy on several counts: “For decades, most researchers have assumed that sexual Read More ›

The 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District court case was a disaster for evolution. This may seem strange given that the ruling struck down the teaching of the opposing Intelligent Design idea. Evolutionists celebrated the decision, how could it be a disaster for them? It was a disaster because, as is sometimes the case in politics and law, the cost of victory is far greater than the spoils.  Read more

In a recent article in USA Today, Professor Jerry Coyne made the following claim:

I’ve never met a Christian, for instance, who has been able to tell me what observations about the universe would make him abandon his beliefs in God and Jesus. (I would have thought that the Holocaust could do it, but apparently not.) There is no horror, no amount of evil in the world, that a true believer can’t rationalize as consistent with a loving God.

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Vincent Torley, and I’m a Christian whose faith in God, Jesus Christ and Intelligent Design is falsifiable. I have the greatest respect for your acknowledged expertise in the field of biology, and I don’t wish to question it for a moment. My Ph.D. is in philosophy, not science. For the record, I accept that the universe is approximately 14 billion years old, and that all living things spring from a common ancestor that lived approximately 4 billion years ago. However, I do not believe that non-foresighted processes (random mutations plus natural selection, in popular parlance) are adequate to account for the complexity we observe in organisms today, or that natural processes suffice to explain the origin of life. Here is a list of observations that would cause me to abandon belief in God, belief in Christianity and belief in Intelligent Design.

Read More ›

In the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District court case, federal judge John Jones was heavily influenced by the first expert witness, evolutionist Ken Miller. As Jones later recalled, he “was taken to school.” Unfortunately what Miller “taught” Jones was a series of scientific misrepresentations. Miller focused on two examples from molecular biology: a pseudogene and a fused chromosome. In both cases Miller gave Jones many facts but the lessons were carefully tailored to misrepresent both the science and evolutionary theory.  Read more

SCIENCE: “Now THAT’s a genome. A rare Japanese flower named Paris japonica sports an astonishing 149 billion base pairs, making it 50 times the size of a human genome—and the largest genome ever found. Until now, the biggest genome belonged to the marbled lungfish, whose 130 billion base pairs weighed in at an impressive 132.83 picograms. (A picogram is one-trillionth of a gram). The genome of the new record-holder, revealed in a paper in the Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, would be taller than Big Ben if stretched out end to end. (The smallest genome known among organisms with nuclei is that of a mammalian parasite known as Encephalitozoon intestinalis, with a relatively paltry 2.25 million base pairs). The Read More ›

Philosophers and scientists who know their business recognize that any attempt to seek knowledge presupposes the existence of a rational universe ripe for investigating. The fact that we even bother to make the effort says something about our nature. As Aristotle says, “all men by nature want to know.” That is why the discovery of a new fact or truth can be a joy for its own sake. To be sure, knowledge also provides practical benefits, empowering us to pursue a self-directed life style, but it also edifies us, leading us on the road to self-actualization. To be intellectually healthy is to be curious.

On the other hand, we can, by virtue of our free will, act against our natural desire to know. For better or worse, there are some truths that many of us would prefer not to know about. The compelling nature of an objective fact can pull us in one direction while the force of our personal desires can pull us in the opposite direction. When this happens, a choice must be made. “Either the thinker conforms desire to truth or he conforms truth to desire.”–E. Michael Jones

Because we experience this ambivalence about the truth, we must be on guard against two errors: (a) talking ourselves out of things that we should believe [hyperskepticism] or (b) talking ourselves into things that we should not believe [gullibility]. Hyperskeptics attempt to justify the first error by calling attention to the second error, as if there was no reasonable alternative to either extreme. On the contrary, the ideal solution is to seek a rational midpoint –to balance a healthy skepticism about unconfirmed truth claims with a healthy confidence in truths already known. The one thing a thinker should not do is be skeptical or open-minded about the first principles of right reason, without which there is no standard for investigating or discoursing about anything “Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”– G. K. Chesterton

In the spirit of public service, then, I present this little test for analyzing our readers’ proclivity for hyperskepticism. Hopefully, those who indulge will not find any predictable patterns, since I strove to keep them at a minimum. Read More ›

Review Of Programming of Life By Donald Johnson, ISBN-10: 0982355467

There are some science writers that quite simply have a knack for combining the detail of their subject of expertise with a talent for exposition that a wide audience can easily understand. Donald Johnson is one of them. After carefully defining the various types of information- functional, prescriptive and Shannon- that information theorists have set out in their realm of study, Johnson takes the reader on a tour of cellular gene expression by focusing on the digital code of DNA. Shannon information, which provides a mathematical measure of improbability without regard to functionality does not help us in the description of life since the digital code of DNA is rich in what Johnson terms “functional prescriptive information”. Read More ›